65. Lucia Berlin — A Manual for Cleaning Women with Mimi Pond

KIM ASKEW: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew...

AMY FOWLER: ...and I'm Amy Helmes. The writer we'll be discussing today, Lucia Berlin, has been called one of America's "best kept secrets" and "the best writer you've never heard of." For much of her adult life, her genius was shrouded in the unglamorous pursuit of trying to get by. She toiled at a series of everyday jobs, raised four sons mostly on her own, and struggled through alcohol addiction and three failed marriages. Yet in the course of her itinerant life, she witnessed and experienced a lot. And she wrote about it all in the form of short stories that are completely engrossing; funny, dark, poignant, perceptive, and anguishing at times.

KIM: Yes, and 76 of those stories were published in her lifetime. Although she had a small following of devoted fans, she never received any widespread notoriety prior to her death, which was in 2004. It wasn't until fairly recently that the world suddenly took notice of Berlin. There was a 2015 compilation of her work, entitled A Manual for Cleaning Women, and it became an immediate New York Times bestseller, portions of which are now being adapted for a film by Pedro Almodovar. Literary critic Ruth Franklin described the power of Berlin's prose perfectly, writing in The New York Times: "Lucia Berlin spins you around, knocks you down and grinds your face into the dirt. Her stories growl."

AMY: That's pretty intense, right? But I kind of agree with it. I mean, at the very least, I think when I was reading this book, it felt like she was reaching through the pages and grabbing me by my collar and almost lifting me off the ground with the strength of her prose. And of course I had that familiar refrain wash over me, which is "How the hell did I not know about her?" And so I'm very grateful to our special guest today who mentioned her to me in passing. And I mean that quite literally -- she told me about Berlin while she was walking her dog, and I was unloading groceries from my car. 

KIM: I love it. That's an LA story. I'm so excited to talk to her, because not only did our guest turn us on to Lucia Berlin, she was actually friends with her.

AMY: Yes. Having a guest with a personal connection to the "lost lady" in question is an exciting first for this podcast, and we can't wait to get her insight. Besides that, I think Mimi is also probably one of the coolest people ever. So let's just read the stacks and get started.

[intro music plays]

Our guest today is Mimi Pond, a cartoonist, illustrator, humorist, and writer. Her cartoons have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Ad Week, and The Paris Review, to name just a few. She is the author and illustrator of five humor books, including the critically acclaimed memoirs Over-Easy and The Customer is Always Wrong, which are inspired by her time waitressing at a diner in Oakland, California. 

KIM: And Mimi has also dabbled, I guess you could put it, in writing for television. In fact, she wrote the very first episode of The Simpsons to air on Fox. Some dabbling! I think that speaks highly of her. 

AMY: Yeah. I told you she was cool, Kim. But Mimi's latest project is also cool. It's a graphic novel about the Mitford sisters. And if you remember, we discussed this family at length last spring in our episode on Nancy Mitford. Mimi's book Do Admit: Making Sense of the Mitford Sisters, will be published by Drawn and Quarterly sometime in the next year or two. 

KIM: Okay, I'm so excited for that to get published, but I also have been following you on Instagram, and I'm completely enthralled by the images that you've been posting from this project. Listeners, please, I highly recommend you go over and follow her at #mimipondovereasy if you know anything about the Mitford sisters and if you follow us, you probably do you're going to want to follow Mimi on Instagram. 

AMY: Mimi also happens to be one of my neighbors. Her daughter, Lulu, used to babysit for my daughter back before she went off to art school in New York, and Mimi's entire family, including her husband, Wayne White, and her son, Woodrow, are talented artists also. To be honest though, I really only know Mimi sort of in passing. I always see you walking your chocolate lab, Mabel, around the block, and let's face it: Mabel is the real legend in our neighborhood. 

MIMI POND: Mabel is the mayor of Hollyknoll Drive.

AMY: Yes, exactly. But I'm so excited to finally get to know you better, Mimi. So thank you again for joining us for this discussion. 

MIMI: Well, I'm happy to be here!

KIM: Okay. So let's dive right in here because first things first, I think we all want to know the story of how you knew Lucia Berlin. Can you tell us a bit about that?

MIMI: Yeah. Well, I was working at that said restaurant in Oakland, Mama's Real Cafe. And there is a local weekly, one of those weekly alternative papers, and I read a story by Lucia in it, and I was just gobsmacked by it. I was like, "Oh my God, this person is fantastic. This is the way I want to write. This is the way I see things." And I looked her up in the phone book and I called her and I introduced myself and she invited me over for coffee. And it was just that simple. She is just, she is who she sounds like in her writing. She is that person, you know? She's funny, she's open, she sees humor in everything, which is astonishing considering the woman lived like 10 different lifetimes in her life, you know, and all this crazy drama. And not only does she see the humor in it, she has such empathy for everyone. Even if it's someone she claims she doesn't like, by the time she's finished thinking about it, she's, you know, considered their point of view. That compassion just comes through in her work so strongly. I was trying to describe her work to a friend this afternoon, and I said, "It's like, there's these horrible tragedies and these horribly cruel moments. And yet it feels like you're eating a souffle." 

AMY: I think almost every story... I almost can't think of one that isn't anguishing, 

KIM: But yet there's a love of life and of living and of appreciating every little thing, and it's so inspiring because we complain about the littlest things. Then you see all the stuff that she has gone through, and yet she's still just eating up life. It's beautiful. 

MIMI: Since we both lived in Oakland and Berkeley, I really loved how she described Oakland and Berkeley and the, you know, the whole Bay Area. There's such true descriptions of the way things were. And like I said, her empathy for complete strangers, you know, people in a laundromat or, you know, on a bus, are so compelling. Also there's a few stories she wrote about a number of elderly women who were neighbors and they would have coffees for each other. And she gets into the minute details of what it's like to be in one of those kinds of houses. Like, you know, my grandmother's house, where women were busy making a Jell-O salad, stuff like that. And she does it with such love. And also, she's covering material no man would ever think of covering, you know? The quiet, desperate lives of older women.

AMY: Okay. I love this story. First of all, that, "I'm just going to try to reach out to her!" And then I love that she was gracious enough to be like, "Yeah, sure!" Did you continue to have a relationship after that? 

MIMI: Yeah, absolutely. And eventually I moved from Oakland to New York and then we had a correspondence. Somewhere around here I have her letters, and I can't tell you where they are. 

AMY: Oh my gosh. 

MIMI: Um, but we corresponded and, you know, I was pursuing a career as a cartoonist in New York. And after a while I was making some money, and she'd written me to say, you know, she felt poor. All she could afford was the Jean Naté cologne from the drug store. And I had a little bit of money, and there was a Ralph Lauren perfume I knew she liked. And I went to Bloomingdale's and I bought her some perfume and I sent it. Just because I was like, "I want to do something for you," you know? 

AMY: Wow. And so at that point, after you had read the first piece, did you just go and devour everything else?

MIMI: Oh, I went and got everything I could! I got this, which I just found out on the internet is worth like $2,600, the original Manual for Cleaning Ladies from 1977. And that's a nice little small press thing. And then I have this, which is also very nice.

KIM: Angel's Laundromat. 

MIMI: And then I have this...

KIM: Phantom Pain...

MIMI: This is Timbuktu Press, 1984, and she signed it, "May, 1984. For Mimi, dear friend, love always, Lucia."

AMY: So you were one of her early fans. I mean, before this re-issue of A Manual for Cleaning Women, you already knew about it. 

MIMI: Oh yeah. I was absolutely thrilled. 

AMY: And I understand that draw when you read the first story she had written that you were just like, "I want to know her," because that's kind of the experience I had reading these stories were like, "Wow, can you imagine having a conversation with her and just hanging out and chilling?" She's so damn funny. 

KIM: Oh, a hundred percent. And you actually did do that! It's amazing. 

AMY: Okay. So the stories in Berlin's collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women, which is the one we'll be discussing, they're typically told from the point of view of women and girls who are leading seemingly disparate lives. So we see one young girl growing up in mining camps in Alaska and Idaho. Another is living with her grandparents in Texas. A third young woman is living in South America with her socialite family. There's an ER nurse, a school teacher, a cleaning lady, a woman living in Mexico with her dying sister, a drug mule in New Mexico. And that's to name just a few of the characters. And the stories are set in laundromats, rehab clinics, tropical resorts, medical buildings, Catholic schools. And many of these characters and stories are kind of quasi-connected in that they recur in more than one story. And in that sense, reading A Manual for Cleaning Women felt a bit to me like reading a more long-form book.

MIMI: I have to just say that her five-paragraph story, "My Jockey," I mean, it's been touted and lauded and stuff, but for me, it's like, "Fuck Ernest Hemingway. This is the shit." 

KIM: Oh my gosh, absolutely! Oh yeah. You said it, you said it. And then the more you read, the more you start to realize almost all these protagonists in the stories are, to varying degrees, her herself, Lucia Berlin. She's drawing from her own very storied personal history. And so Mimi, could you give our listeners maybe the broad strokes of Berlin's life, which we see reflected in her? 

MIMI: Well, she was born in Alaska. Her father was a mining engineer. They lived in mining camps in, like, Montana and Arizona and Colorado. And then she lived with her grandparents during World War II. I think her father was in the war. Then their fortunes turned, and he took a job in Chile. He was paid quite well, and suddenly she's, you know, goes from being pretty poor to this fabulously top of Chilean society ... aristocrats ... wealthy people from all over. Prince Ali Khan, she famously said, lit her cigarette, 

KIM: Her first cigarette. Right. 

MIMI: Which is great when she's telling it to an Indian in a laundromat. It just blows my mind. 

KIM: Yeah. Completely.

MIMI: The fact that her father, basically, he pimped her out at 14. And she told me that was a true story. A wealthy Chilean landowner that they, you know, they wanted to get in good with. I mean, it's just like, ohhhh .... and the story that she tells about that, even, there's, there's compassion for the man who essentially raped her. It's astonishing. She really, um, manages just to see every point of view. So from there, she goes back to the states and I think she enrolled in college and met her first husband. And I'm not sure, I think he abandoned her after she'd had one child and was pregnant with another. And then she married the first nice guy that came along and then left him for this hot-shot jazz musician, Buddy Berlin, who was very handsome and very glamorous from a wealthy family. He'd been at Harvard. His family had money. They went to Mexico for like the honeymoon with the kids, and I don't know how many hours into the marriage she finds out he's a heroin addict! So eventually that marriage ended and she wound up in Oakland and Berkeley with her four boys. So then she's a single mother raising four boys on her own. They were teenagers when I met her. You know, she was always a writer's writer. She never made that leap. You know, she's published by Black Sparrow Press, and that's, you know, prestigious and everything, but there was never any real money in it for her. She won a few different literary awards, which helped some, but she was still just, you know, living in a basically studio apartment at the end of her life, probably paid for by one of her sons. It would have thrilled her to no end to see that she has finally achieved fame. I'm sure up there she's thrilled that her sons are making some money from her work. That's what she always worked for anyways. 

AMY: Yeah. She had all these kinds of workaday jobs, like school teacher, switchboard operator, working in a hospital.

KIM: Yeah. I just can't imagine raising four sons and going through everything she was going through that she managed to do. 

MIMI: Well, I guess that's why she drank. 

AMY: I know. Yeah. So that's another question. Was she battling alcoholism when you knew her? 

MIMI: You know what? She probably was, and I was too young and stupid to notice. You know, she was on and off the wagon a few times. If she was, I wasn't really aware of it, but you know, someone like her was like high-functioning and probably able to hide it pretty well from a young woman she just met, you know?

KIM: Yeah. I mean, if you're nursing and doing all the things she was doing while she was struggling with it, it's kind of, she must have been high-functioning.

MIMI: Teaching grade school. Teaching in prisons, working in hospitals, you know, whatever she could get. And she still had the energy to come home and write like that with four sons. So it's like...

KIM: incredible.

MIMI: Yeah. 

AMY: So as you kind of mentioned earlier, it really does feel like she lived many, many different lives in just one lifetime, more than the rest of us, for sure. In her stories, she likes to shock at times. There are some punch-to-the-proverbial-gut moments, which I kind of likened to almost having like that "Chuck Palahniuk" level of twisted sometimes.

MIMI: Yeah.

AMY: That makes me wonder how much of what she wrote should we understand to be true? Because so much of it reads like memoir, but what's your take on this? I mean, can we take some of this stuff literally? 

MIMI: I mean, you can take some of it literally. Maybe some of it not so literally. I don't know enough about her, intimately, to know. Like there's one story where she kills her husband's drug dealer in Mexico and takes him out in a boat and dumps him in the ocean. I'm not sure that's true, although you kind of want it to be! 

KIM: Yeah. She probably wished she could. 

AMY: Yeah. The one that I think of most is the pulling of the grandfather's teeth when she was like a 13 year old girl.

MIMI: I believe that happened.

KIM: I believe it happened, too. That one just rings so true for me.

MIMI: Yeah.

AMY: I mean, first of all, the description is so gory and shocking and so funny at the same time, like the teabag shoved in his mouth. This is from a short story that is called "Dr. H.A. Moynihan." And I guess her grandfather was a dentist, so ... I mean, the way I kind of look at it, it probably can't all possibly be true, but the feeling that the incidents evoke are true. Maybe she tells a story and, you know, adds something to it or makes it more dramatic, but the feeling that she's trying to convey I believe was true to her life. That feeling of horror, whether she actually pulled all the teeth or not. It feels like you're sitting in a dentist's chair reading that story. It feels like somebody is coming at you with pliers, basically. 

KIM: Yeah. And the activeness of all these emotions and mixed feelings she has about her grandfather coming out in this violent kind of horrific, but also really funny scene. It's all wrapped up together. 

AMY: Yeah. So let's get into the stories a little more actually. What do you think, Mimi? If you had to kind of sum up sort of the hallmarks of a Lucia Berlin story, we've kind of talked about it a little, but what do you think her strengths are? 

MIMI: As I said, the overwhelming sense of compassion for people. She's always putting herself in their place. She just has this sort of love of life and of people from all walks of life, you know, from the wealthiest to the poorest and real poverty, um, her confidence in the way she tells stories is astonishing, too. There's never a feeling like she doesn't know exactly what she's doing, the way she frames everything. She makes it look easy. 

KIM: Absolutely. She knows what she's doing and she has you in hand, but then she has this tenderness and empathy, which it feels like she has it for her own life, too, which is wonderful. And then she has it for the characters, especially the true down-and-out ones. Like I'm thinking of the Native American in the laundromat, for example. It's so moving, because considering her own life, it just feels incredibly genuine. She puts herself on the same level as all the characters she's writing. 

AMY: Yes, she has this impartiality when it comes to people from all walks of life. It doesn't matter what class they are in. She treats them all on kind of the same level. And I think that kind of goes to what we're talking about a little bit. Mimi, you talked about "My Jockey." That was one of her stories that's set in a hospital or set in the emergency room. And those were some of my favorites, honestly. Her commentary on the human condition, I guess, in the midst of a hospital situation was so profound. My favorite, I think, was the one it's called Temps Perdu, like "Lost Time," and she's basically in the emergency room dealing with all these sort of mundane ... kind of like changing bed pans, you know, all that kind of stuff, but then she's flashing back and forth with her past, her childhood in Idaho and sort of a childhood sweetheart of hers, Kent Shreve. I don't know if you guys remember that story, but it's the one where basically they got stuck in the rafters and they were hanging upside down from their knees for hours and the ladder had fallen. And it was such a romantic story. And I think so many of her stories are so dark, and she has all this deadpan humor, but she's not really cynical. And in fact, I think she's very much a hopeless romantic. 

MIMI: Yeah. 

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: Hold on, let me find it. So she says, "I spent one night with him, the night my baby sister had her tonsils. Red sent me and my blankets up the ladder to the loft where the five older children slept on straw. There was no window, just an opening in the eaves covered with black oilcloth. Kentshereve poked a hole in it with an ice pick and there was a jet of air like on airplanes only icy cold. If you put your ear to it you could hear the icicles in the pines, chandeliers, the creaking of the mine shaft, ore cars. It smelled of cold and wood smoke. When I put my one eye to the tiny hole I saw stars as if for the first time, magnified, the sky, dazzling and vast. If I so much as blinked my eye it all disappeared. We stayed awake waiting to hear his parents doing it but they never did. I asked him what he thought it was like. He held his hand up to mine so our fingers were all touching, had me run my thumb and forefinger over our touching ones. You can't tell which is which. Must be something like that he said." 

KIM: Oh, the chills. So good. 

AMY: Um, yeah, Mimi, any others? I mean, we talked about "My Jockey" ... which ones instantly stick out to you?

MIMI: Oh, well [the one about] the music box. ["Silence."] It was about selling chances and she was a kid in El Paso, and seven-years-old, and eventually in the story, uh, she and her friend really hit it big selling these tickets for this non-existent music box. And they wind up in Juárez in a restaurant where everyone's lavishing pesos on them and giving them food and falling over them. Nothing bad ever happens to them, which is amazing, but it's also about, you know, her sort of realizing that as a child, that she has this power over people, to charm them and to get them to give her money. She and her friend are just like little hustlers running all over town, getting dimes and quarters from everyone. 

AMY: Yeah, I, this is a tangent, but it's making me think of just the fact that there's so many little surprising moments; things that just take you by surprise all of a sudden that you weren't expecting in a story. Like I'm thinking of the one, um, I can't remember what the name of the story is .. With Henrietta. She's throwing up bird seed to the birds and... 

MIMI: About wanting to make a good impression? 

AMY: Yes. Yeah. And she's just having such a lovely day outside her house and it seems so pleasant and all of a sudden the cat jumps up and eats all the birds! 

KIM: Oh yeah, totally.

AMY: It happens all the time in her story. 

KIM: I wanted to read one, um, if we have time. We talked about her loving life and everything, and she kind of talks about it in the one, "Strays," where she is basically in a rehab sort of alternative to prison out in the middle of nowhere. And she ends up being outside with the cook, basically, and then having this experience: "The world just goes along. Nothing much matters, you know? I mean really matters. But then sometimes, just for a second, you get this grace, this belief that it does matter, a whole lot. He felt that way too. I heard the catch in his throat. Some people may have said a prayer, knelt down, at a moment like that. Sung a hymn. Maybe cavemen would have done a dance. What we did was make love." 

AMY: Yeah. It's the ability to find beauty and grace in sort of the most dark and kind of dirty environments, basically. I don't think it's overreaching at all to say she was a literary genius. 

KIM: No, it's not overreaching. 

AMY: I was reading an article in The Guardian, I think, um, that kind of talked about the fact that she kept going over and over the same stories; we kept going back to Mexico City and this sister who was dying, and each story is a little different, but The Guardian article says "Berlin seems to share the view that individual narratives aren't sufficient to capture certain episodes in life. As the narrator of "Silence," one of her stories says, 'I have a piece of family lore. I know it is true that grandpa shot him, but how it happened has about 10 different versions.'"

KIM: It's almost like a piece of music where you keep hearing, um, you know, the same part over, but a little bit different. Like you think of Handel's "Messiah." And then there's a crescendo and then it kind of comes down, but it's all woven throughout. And I feel like this book is kind of like that. 

AMY: Yeah. And I think your memory of things works that way, and so it makes a lot of sense. When I was reading her stories I kept thinking of sort of looking through a pane of glass in the rain so that there's raindrops all over the window. You're seeing the bigger picture, but then there's all these little, tiny prisms that are the stories, you know, and each one is telling a different episode of her life. It was fascinating. It was like a jigsaw puzzle, reading this, to sort of put together the mystery of her life. Which was AMAZING. I really am embarrassed that I hadn't heard of her even with the re-issue a few years ago. I mean, I guess I was just busy when all of that was happening, because it was a bestseller, you know, when it came out. But it's insane to me that she's not more well-known, and I've seen it written, and I would agree, that she even maybe deserved a Pulitzer Prize in her lifetime, yet she was never published by a major publishing house. Mimi, I don't know if you know this or not. I mean, I don't know if you could say, but do you think she had any bitterness or regrets about the fact that her work was not as widely read as it clearly deserves to be? 

MIMI: I don't know. Honestly, I couldn't tell you. It's just that she had such a sunny outlook. You can't quite imagine her spending that much time being bitter about something like that. One of the last times I saw her, we went out for lunch and, um, I think it was a fried chicken place and it wasn't very good, but we're sitting there in a booth and there was a woman by herself sitting in another booth who had set up camp and it was like we were living inside one of Lucia's stories. This older elderly woman who had been crocheting those pillow dolls, you know? There's a pillow and there's like the dresses crocheted around it? And she had like three or four of them arranged, like she was going to be selling them, and she was working on another. It just felt like such a "Lucia" moment. It was just kind of heartbreaking and funny and sad all at once. We both kind of looked at each other like...

KIM: Oh, yeah, yeah. 

AMY: Totally. Um, I almost have to think if she had this kind of crazy notoriety and she had taken off in her late twenties and thirties as a writer and became very popular, I just don't know if we would've gotten this kind of collection of short stories. Because she had to have kind of lived... I think she would have still been a brilliant writer and maybe it would have been different. I mean, you can't take away her talent, but would we have gotten these kinds of stories? 

MIMI: That's an interesting theory. Yeah. 

AMY: So what do you know? Do you know much about how she kind of got her start? 

MIMI: I don't know that much about it. I know Ed Dorn, the beat poet, became a big mentor of hers later, but I don't recall that much about her earliest work. 

AMY: But she did receive some recognition in her lifetime. I think there was a select circle in the literary community that maybe it was like, "Oh, she's pretty good." 

KIM: She's a writer's writer. I think I read that.

MIMI: Well, it says here that she won the Jack London Short Prize for 1985 and also an American Book Award in 1991 for Homesick, and also got a fellowship for the National Endowment for the Arts. And I think I remember seeing her right after that and she'd bought herself a new car. 

KIM: Oh, that's great. So, I mean, as someone who knew her, it must be so gratifying to see her finally getting...

MIMI: Oh, it's so... it's, I mean, it's thrilling for her and it's also just for me, it's like, "I KNEW!!!" 

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: 100 percent. Um, did she ever give you any feedback on your writing? 

MIMI: She may have. Like I said, I have letters somewhere, but I don't remember that specifically. It's just, I mean, we talked about how when you have an experience and then you decide you're going to, you know, tell your friends about it, and you've started trying to figure out how to frame the story. She said that's how you write. You practice by telling people, and that stuck with me.

AMY: Actually one of her stories is all about her teaching creative writing at a prison, which gave a lot of good insight into her approach to writing. Just reading that story alone and what she shared with the prisoners was interesting.

MIMI: Yes. 

AMY: So even at the time of her death in 2004 she was still writing, which is impressive because it sounds like she was in a lot of pain. She suffered from scoliosis all her life.

MIMI: And then she had lung cancer, too, because she smoked. I took my children with me once to visit her. And she was living in a little unit behind her son's house, and my kids were maybe like five and eight, and they were running around and she was uncharacteristically cranky. And I knew that she probably had to be in pain. 

AMY: So all the more impressive that she was actually still writing around that time! She was working on a book of more autobiographical sketches. They were put together in a collection called Welcome Home that Farrar, Straus and Giroux published in 2018. It's an unfinished work, um, but it kind of is a bit more autobiographical where she actually goes through the chronology, recounting her origins in Juneau, going all the way up to the husband that you mentioned, the jazz musician, in Mexico in 1966. And so I'd love to read that to get even more insight and maybe a little bit more, um, kind of my answer that question a little bit more, like what really happened? What was she embellishing in her story? So did you read that one at all by chance? 

MIMI: I haven't read that yet. In fact, I have to say, boning up for this podcast I was like, "I've got to reread everything!" I hadn't really read anything in a long time, and it's so good, but it's almost excruciating because it's so good. Every sentence is just like a dagger. I mean, in a good way, but it's emotionally exhausting. 

KIM: I think that's absolutely true, 

AMY: But it's not depressing. 

KIM: No, no. It's just so engaging. 

MIMI: Yeah. Yeah. Engaging really is the word. I mean, it just forces you to feel these things.

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. 

KIM: Yeah. I think it's great that A Manual for Cleaning Women is being adapted for film by Pedro Almodovar, and it would be his first English language film. I just recently watched Volver again, and it's just so gorgeous. I think that's an amazing director to take up this project, and Cate Blanchett is attached, which seems pretty perfect, too. And it's going to be set in Texas, Oakland and Mexico. That's all I know about it. 

AMY: Yeah. So Mimi, what are your thoughts about this movie coming down the pike?

MIMI: I mean, I love Almodovar. It'll be interesting to see if he can capture the dialogue, you know, in the way that she does, since English isn't his first language. I'll just be curious to see what that's like.

AMY: We talked about ... well, we showed Mimi, our #readlucia tote bags that we each have. And so I am so excited to take it everywhere and hopefully have it be a conversation starter. I want to now share your crusade, Mimi, because not enough people know her.

MIMI: So many women writers have been dismissed for telling women's stories, you know? Like, oh, that's just "women" stuff. Like it's not important.

KIM: Domestic life. Exactly. 

AMY: Yeah. Um, and speaking of women, let's talk a little bit about your Mitford book. What inspired you to tackle the Mitfords? 

MIMI: Well, I only knew about Jessica Mitford growing up because my parents bought this book, The American Way of Death, which was her expose on the American funeral industry. I think I was in my twenties before someone said to me, "You know, there were other sisters," and I was like, "What?" Then I proceeded to read everything I could get my hands on, you know, from Nancy Mitford's comic novels to books about all of them. There's a number of books about all of them. And then Jessica Mitford also wrote a wonderful memoir called about their childhood. Um, Nancy of course, self mythologized, the entire family. It's like Lucia, you know? She was loosely basing all these novels on her family. And then Diana wrote a memoir and Deborah, the youngest, wrote a couple of different books. But what fascinates me about them is that there were six aristocratic sisters. They're raised in the countryside in the middle of nowhere with no one else to talk to, and they're also not socialized the way girls are in schools, where they make it really clear to you from the get-go that "You're a girl; you're not as important. You're not going to use this information. You're just going to get married. So whatever." So they all just decided they were all going to do whatever they wanted to do. And they all went out and they did, you know, for better or for worse. They all stuck to their guns. They all did the most outrageous stuff. They met everyone from Maya Angelo to JFK, to Lead Belly, to Winston Churchill, who was their cousin. They knew everyone, they all went everywhere and they did stuff women weren't supposed to do. And it gets really crazy. Stories you just can't believe, and you know, they're made to be told and visualized. And there's been lots of books written about them, but no one's done a graphic novel.

AMY: Well, we can't wait for it.

KIM: Yeah, we want to tell everyone about it when it comes out. 

AMY: Yeah. We hope you will come back on, and actually, it would be fun to have you on with Leslie Brody, who wrote a Jessica... 

MIMI: Yes, a Jessica biography, which is excellent.

KIM: Yeah, she was one of our guests for the Harriet the Spy episode that we did on Louise Fitzhugh 

MIMI: Harriet the Spy, that book made me who I am. 

AMY: Awww!

KIM: So great. And then also we had Laura Thompson on, who's written several Mitford biographies. So yeah, a "Mitford Fest" on Lost Ladies of Lit. I love it. 

MIMI: I have other obscure women writers I need to tell you about.

AMY: Oh yeah. We're all ears. 

KIM: Oh yeah. We love hearing more. 

AMY: Shoot us an email with all your suggestions, for sure. We are trying to hit everybody up. And we're very jealous that you knew Lucia. Thank you, again, so much, for telling me about her. 

MIMI: Oh, you're welcome. It was all my pleasure. 

KIM: I hope to meet you in person. Thank you so much. 

MIMI: Oh, sure. You're welcome. 

KIM: So we'll see you next week. In the meantime, don't forget to leave a review where you listen to this podcast. It really makes a difference and drop us a line by email or an Instagram or our Facebook page if you're feeling so inclined. We love hearing from you.

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.